Category: website management

Its easy to take a dig at the efforts others in the public sector web world. Direct Gov is a good example. Its a pretty prominent shadow hanging over the rest of us in central and local government for all sorts of reasons. But its also an easy target because of its size, and the importance it has been given as the result of transformational government and the website ‘rationalisation’ cull.

I sometimes wonder if they don’t help themselves enough by not being more open about their work or answering critics. However they are quite a small team considering the importance of Direct Gov, with limited resources, and they can’t do everything.

Case in point is Public Sector Forums (PSF). Direct Gov is a particular target of theirs and I always enjoy their take on things. PSF is primarily for webbies working in local government. I know very little about their world, my perception is that they are way more sophisticated than central government in delivering e-government because they have faced very stretching targets over the last few years to deliver services online. Webbies in Whitehall have a lot to learn from them.

Equally I can only guess their sense of frustration and what might be perceived as Whitehall-imposed initatives. Sometimes it can be frustrating enough for us in government departments and we’re a lot closer to the centre geographically and psychologically.

PSF ran a piece while I was away on holiday taking a dig at Direct Gov and COI after discovering their respective del.icio.us accounts (The article is only available to subscribers so you’ll have to join if you want to view it). As holiday reading (I know, I really should have left the laptop at home..) it made perfect amusing reading. A few samples:

“We don’t want to ‘analyse’ the list of reading material in too much detail. We’ll leave that to one web ‘expert’ who we trust to have a good grip on these things, and who is perhaps best left anonymous, whose verdict on the reading lists was: “It’s not cutting edge, more catch up” ”

“All the news on Google over the past months and there’s only one link, which is negative. Also practically nothing on usability and accessibility.”

But on reflection I thought, isn’t it a shame that we spend so much time criticising each other and taking little pot shots? Aren’t we all striving for the same thing, improving online government provision for the citizen? Personally I’m glad that COI and Direct Gov are using tools like del.icio.us to share knowledge with their teams. Goodness knows that there is so much to learn about out there, I applaud their adoption of tools like this. They could have kept the accounts private but they chose to share them instead. Wouldn’t it be great if all public sector webbies followed their lead and used a common tag such as ‘govweb’  to mark out information of interest for all of us?

I’m not knocking PSF, as I said I enjoy their coverage and take on things. In fact I applaud the recent initative they are promoting to establish a public sector web management group (PWSMG). Initatives such as this can only help to share the knowledge and experience of the community of webbies to improve our work. I’m involved in a few different forums but without the backing and momentum of an organisation or energised individual it is very hard to gain traction.

I’m really glad that PSF are helping PSWMG to get going. I’m hoping to attend their inaugural event in October. Wouldn’t it be great if someone from Direct Gov was their too to be part of the community of public sector webbies?

All over whitehall, officials are getting ready to breathe a sigh of relief. Recess starts at the end of this week and that means MPs and ministers will go off on their holidays, things will get a bit quieter, and everyone can get some well earned R&R.

Unfortunately, the week or so before recess is a nightmare for people running government websites. Policy officials all over the department suddenly remember that they were supposed to have something published online months ago and they’re going on holiday for three weeks at half four.

‘It simply must be published’ , ‘It’s one of the department’s priorities’, ‘The minister has insisted that it goes on the website today’, are all commonly heard phrases from anxious harassed officials on the phone during weeks like this.

To be fair to them, sometimes policy decisions are made late in the day as ministers clear their boxes before they go off on hols. The problem is the officials conveniently forget to tell us that something might be coming our way until they’ve got that magic signature on the submission. Then insist that something must be done that instant. If we calmly explain that, ‘we are already dealing with twenty similar requests, we’ll try to fit them in but it might not be until tomorrow’, you can bet your bottom dollar that their manager will call back in five minutes insisting that their pronouncement is more important than anyone elses.

They often forget to tell us that they are also going on holiday tonight. But we always know the underlying reason.  Case in point. Last summer one of my staff took an ‘urgent’ call early on Friday morning. Usual story, the world will end if this is not published by the end of today, the minister had read the runes blah blah blah.

(us) ‘Alright, we’ll do our best, can you send us the documents in question together with the form we send out for all publication jobs’ (this covers things like metadata, where on the site it should go etc etc).

Nothing heard back by lunchtime. We called them – out to lunch. Left messages, still nothing.

Finally made contact at around 3pm. (them) ‘Why haven’t you published it yet?’ – (us) ‘You haven’t sent the documents to us’.

Wait a bit longer, call back – (us) ‘Is this still happening, we assume its not as you haven’t sent anything’ – (them) ‘I’ll send it in five minutes’.

Forty five minutes later, the email arrives. No documents attached. Try calling back, no reply. Send an urgent email ‘we tried calling you, need the documents urgently’. Twenty seconds later, we get an out of office message, on holiday for three weeks. Urgently tried calling, eventually somebody else picks up the phone, ‘Sorry he’s gone, don’t know anything about the documents’.

Three weeks later, (them) ‘why didn’t you do that thing I asked you?’ (us) ‘you didn’t send it’.

Its the same every time… Still next week it will be a little quieter.

Been sweating over writing a few articles in the last few days but can’t seem to summon up the inspiration to complete them – website rationalisation and more thoughts on consultation will have to wait for another day – when along comes Paul Canning with an excellent article about the importance of search marketing for government and where DirectGov is getting it wrong. An essential read.

I’m no expert on search marketing. I understand the basics but we don’t spend money on paid for search in my department. What we do, and are very good at, is natural search – also known as search engine optimisation. This the art of ensuring your keywords, descriptions, metatags and content are optimised so that people can find your content easily – and so your content is ranked higher by Google et al (note: lack of technical skill ensures this is a Mickey Mouse description, please don’t heckle..). Continue reading “Search engine optimisation and search marketing”